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The Axandra newsletter archive
28 January 2003
WEEKLY SEARCH ENGINE FACTS
http://www.Axandra.com
Issue #40 - January 28, 2003
Copyright 2003 Axandra / Voget Selbach Enterprises GmbH
Welcome to a new issue of the Search Engine Facts newsletter.
This week we're starting a new series that tells you what you can do to get a better sales/visitor ratio. As always, we're also bringing you the latest search engine news.
1. How to improve the effectiveness of your Web pages
Our newsletter is all about search engine ranking facts. You know that a high ranking is very important to get high quality targeted traffic to your Web site. The more targeted your visitors are, the more you'll sell on your site.
However, a high ranking alone is not enough. Many webmasters have the problem that their visitors don't buy something on their site even if the way the visitors reached the site indicates that they're interested in the products.
For that reason, we're going to tell you in a new series what you can do to improve the effectiveness of your Web site .
PART 1: The first 3 critical points - Make a good first impression, or your visitors will leave immediately
When Web surfers come to your site, it's very important that you make a good first impression. Before a Web surfer starts reading the copy text on your Web page, your page must pass these three critical points:
- Your Web page must load quickly
Web surfers won't wait for slow loading Web pages. If your Web pages don't load as fast as is possible, a lot of Web surfers will go away before they have had a chance to take a look at your Web pages.
Don't forget that still the majority of Web surfers use a 28K/56K modem to surf the Internet. If your Web page is 120 KB big (including the images), then it takes 17 seconds to load the page. Would you wait so long?
- Your Web site must look good
Make sure that your Web site has a professional layout. People don't want to purchase from a shady backyard business. It's very important that your Web pages look perfect. Hire a professional Web designer if necessary.
The same is valid for your link pages. If you want to exchange links with other sites, make sure that your link pages look attractive. A link on your link pages should be something other people want to have.
Make your link pages accessible from your other Web pages and use a great layout for your link pages.
- Don't use automatically generated doorway pages
Automatically created doorway pages might bring some visitors to your site. However, they'll land on a Web page that was designed with search engines spiders in mind.
Automatically created doorway pages usually look ugly to human Web surfers. Often, they consist of nothing more than a list of buzz-words. You won't get good results with this method because human Web surfers will quickly close such a Web page.
If your Web site fails under one of these categories, Web surfers will leave your site before you even have the chance to tell them your marketing message.
In the next issues, we're going to tell you what you can do to get a higher conversion rate for your site. We're going to tell you how to keep customers on your site and how to quickly direct them to the right pages. Finally, we're going to tell you how to close a sale on your Web site.
2 . Search engine news of the week
* News from SearchKing vs. Google
In SearchKing vs. Google the judge has denied SearchKing's request for preliminary injuction. This means that the judge said no to reinstate SearchKing's old PageRank while the trial is being held.
* New AllTheWeb features
AllTheWeb now offers browser plug ins that expand the search capabilities of your Web browser. AllTheWeb offers plug ins for Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera, Mozilla and Mac OS browsers.
In addition, you can now search AllTheWeb with boolean operators such as AND, OR and ANDNOT. For example, you can now search for "Canada ANDNOT Toronto" to get results about Canada that doesn't mention Toronto.
AllTheWeb has also added a new optional interface to its search engine that resembles Google's home page.
* Keyword-based advertising from AskJeeves
* Teoma has been relaunched
The search engine Teoma, owned by Ask Jeeves, has unveiled "Teoma 2.0". They claim that the new version would improve relevancy in a bigger index of one billion Web pages.
In addition, Teoma now offers a spell check for search terms as well as advanced search tools such as searching by exact phrase, page location and search within results.
* AltaVista improves search
SearchEngineShowdown.com reports that you can now use the asterisk symbol ("*") on AltaVista to search for an unlimited number of letters.
For example, you can now search AltaVi transparency and transplantation.
* CareerBuilder.com chooses FAST over Google
The online job company CareerBuilder.com needed a new search tool for its site and chose the search technology from FAST (which powers AllTheWeb) over the one Google offers.
CareerBuilder said they wanted a search technology that not only returns results based on traditional search term relevancy but also return matches from pay for position clients.
* KartOO signs two-year agreement with Overture
The French meta search engine KartOO has signed a two-year agreement with the pay per click search engine Overture.
* New Google country
Almost weekly, Google adds a new country to its set of search sites. This time it's Puerto Rico.
* New Google weblogs
Do you speak Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean or Dutch? Then check out new personal Web pages that report about Google. (Found at " http://www.googuide.com/".)
3. Recommended resources
* Are some of your Web pages banned from search engines?
If you use your important keywords too often on your Web pages, the pages might be banned from search engines because of "keyword stuffing".
Search engines consider keyword stuffing as a spamming attempt and they will not list those Web pages that contain too many keywords.
The webmaster tool Internet Business Promoter helps you to find out if your Web pages have the right keyword density for a high ranking on search engines.
* Web sites we recommend
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